Recently I was asked to build some single-handed Guitar Hero controllers to show at the Games for Health conference, and Red Octane was kind enough to donate some guitars for me to experiment with. Here are the results, I built two of them:

These replace the strum and whammy bar from a standard guitar, allowing you to use a single hand for the chords. What you do is use your foot and click your toes up or down to strum or navigate menus. To perform a whammy you lift up your heel – the spring loaded plate is shown in the up (full whammy) position in the photo, but normally your heel compresses it (no whammy). The pedal plugs into a modified Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul wireless controller. You can still strum the modified guitar but the whammy is only on the pedal.

For more photos and info check the rest of the story below. This project also finally gave me an excuse to throw together a “music video” demonstrating its use, check it out here.